In the play "Oedipus the King" Sophocles depicts Oedipus' inevitable downfall, which represents man's struggle between free will and fate. In an attempt to use the audience's knowledge to his advantage, Sophocles opens the play seventeen years after Oedipus murders his father, Laius and marries his mother, Jocasta. The sequence in which the story unravels reveals the strong psychological focus towards Oedipus' character. In search of his identity, Oedipus' enigmatic quality and moral ambiguity compels readers to question whether his ignorance renders him morally blameless. The vagueness about Oedipus' intellectual state can be interpreted as unconscious knowledge, which may make him morally culpable. Guilty or not, the psychological undertones surrounding Oedipus' actions serve as catalyst towards his inevitable revelation. .
Oedipus' struggle between fate and free will reveal a sense of humanism in his character. Despite his independent and curious nature, attempting to defy the prophecy of his future inadvertently pushed him further towards his fate. In front of the chorus, Oedipus declares "that the unknown murderer, and his accomplices, if such there be, may wear the brand of shame for their shameful act, unfriended, to their life's end" (32). Although the outcome of the play is already known beforehand, Oedipus' determination towards solving the mystery of Laius' murder causes one to question how much Oedipus truly knew about his past. The inability to establish Oedipus' innocence or guilt connects to a fundamental inability to determine the extent of his ignorance. When the blind prophet Teiresias is asked to point out the murderer, he states that "[the murderer] that came seeing, bling shall he go; rich now, then a beggar; stick-in-hand, groping his way to a land of exile" (38). With such a heightened importance of fate throughout the play, Oedipus may be absolved from some of the blame for his actions.
